Senior Software Engineer, Perpetuals

Role overview

Polymarket is launching perpetual futures and is hiring Senior Backend Engineers to own core backend exchange systems. The work focuses on low-latency order matching, high-throughput order state management, and the infrastructure required to keep an exchange reliable under load.

Responsibilities

• Own core exchange backend systems powering order matching, position management, and order state for perpetual futures
• Build and optimize the matching engine
  • Profile hot paths, reduce lock contention, and improve latency/throughput with production-backed benchmarks
• Design for correctness at scale
  • Implement queueing and backpressure to keep the order book consistent and reliable under high load
  • Prevent issues like crossing books, ghost fills, and stale order state
• Build for observability
  • Add metrics, logs, and distributed traces
  • Establish rollback guarantees and narrow critical paths for faster incident response
• Improve runtime performance
  • Optimize CPU, memory, and allocations for production high-throughput workloads
• Own production incidents end-to-end
  • Debug latency and correctness issues and ensure systems measurably improve after incidents

Requirements

• Senior-level backend engineering experience with prior work on order-book-based exchange systems
• Deep knowledge of low-latency systems: concurrency, lock contention, async correctness, and performance profiling
• Experience building matching engines and/or order state management
• Comfort working in Rust (or strong willingness to work in it)
• Strong observability fundamentals: metrics, logs, distributed traces, and profiling tools
• Strong CS fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, systems design

Nice to have

• Experience with high-frequency / low-latency trading infrastructure
• Familiarity with Redis, PostgreSQL, gRPC, Protobuf
• Kubernetes and AWS production operations experience

Location

Utica-Rome Area